Black and white.

It’s all black or white.

Ana is the white. She tells me to starve, starve, starve, you’re not good enough, you’re too fat, thinner is winner, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, fade to perfection.

The only way you’ll ever be perfect is if you’re nothing: fade, fade, fade.

The black is when I break: when I decide not to starve anymore, when I can’t stand the emptiness, when some part of me knows that to eat is to live, when I need to give up....  it’s black because it’s awful. I gorge myself, no pause, even as the calories keep multiplying in my head, and the guilt shoots me, over and over, and I’m not dead yet, even though I just want the pain to end.

I’m stuck on a wheel. Black and white are the only two colors. I’ve never known  gray. Just black, then white, then black, then white again. Wrong, right, good, bad, up, down, back, forth, skinny, fat.

The worst part is that my self-torture is the main source of my hope

When I’m empty, I have control. I’ll be perfect. I’ll finally do this. I’ll finally get to my goal weight if I can keep my mouth shut. Must not eat! Must not eat! No eating! Pounds shed off, sliding off my body like the  4 litres of lemon water I drank to stop myself from being hungry, you can thank the pro Ana community for that one, and I KNOW I can do it. 5lbs more, 10 lbs more, more more more more more.

More food. That’s what it always comes to, in the end. I’ll recover, I say. I will. I want peace. I want normal. But I haven’t known normal for two years and I resort to the only other behaviour I know: bingeing. And once the guilt drapes me in blankets of suffocating, perfect silk, I know I’ll never recover.

After all, I’m too fat to have an eating disorder.